Busking for Advertising Dollars Online - Making Money with YouTube for Musicians

While it seems that a good number of Handpan musicians are already familiar with the practice of using Google’s “Adsense” program to make some extra cash from their YouTube performances - if you have not yet explored the option, here’s a short guide to what it’s all about.

“Adsense” is Google’s long established advertising platform, that pairs advertisers, with publishers, taking a cut of the revenue for themselves, for the service they provide. And when Google bought YouTube back in 2006, you can be sure that increasing the online “real estate” upon which they could place their adverts, was very much at the front of their mind.

A Necessary Evil

While these adverts can be highly-annoying for the viewer - for the modern-day musician, hoping to make a living from their craft, in days of widespread music piracy, at a time where people often consider FREE access to ALL music, at ANY time, to be almost a right - musicians have been forced to adapt. And performing for advertising dollars, over on the internet’s most visited video hosting platform, can provide a much needed trickle of income for some, and huge jackpot style wins, for those lucky, gifted, or hard-working enough, to fully capture the hearts and minds of the citizens of the interwebs.

Turning Adsense on at YouTube

While the pathways to certain options change from time-to-time within the YouTube dashboard. At time of posting - Click on “My Channel” (top-left) > Click on “Video Manager” (Top-center) > Click on “Channel” (mid-left) > And then "enable monetization" - and then follow the instructions from there.

How much can you make using Adsense on your videos at YouTube?

In an article over at Rolling Stones magazine, they cite Psy’s “Gangnam Style”, as being one of the more successful YouTube hits to date - which is estimated to have made somewhere between $800,000 to $2 million in revenue - all from those annoying little adverts. They then go on to state that ‘Videos festooned with ads make roughly $2 per 1,000 YouTube views’, which gives you some idea, of how much you could already be making, if you already have a sizeable audience, but have yet to turn the adverts on. Or of what sort of level you’ll need to be aiming for - if you are hoping to retire to a private island, on the advertising money made from your music videos.

Hang Massive’s 2011 YouTube release, Once Again, has to date received 16,685,944 views. And we can see that Hang Massive do have the adverts turned on. Which means that while we’re not saying that Hang Massive have earned the following amount, if we’ve done the maths right (16,685,944/1000x2), Hang Massive’s video could have earned them around thirty-three thousand dollars, and counting. Which seems like a reasonable return, for a video that they most likely would have made, and shared, regardless. Though it also has to be said, that (to our knowledge) Hang Massive's Once Again, is thee most watched Handpan video ever (thus far). Meaning that to match that level of success, you are going to need to pull something truly spectacular, out of the bag. But for the rest of us, it can still be a fun way of making a few extra bucks, doing what we love to do anyway.